1. Statement of the Technical Field
The present invention relates to the field of computer speech recognition, text-to-speech technology and telephony, and more particularly to a system and method for a run-time simulation environment for voice applications that simulates and automates user interaction.
2. Description of the Related Art
Functionally testing voice applications presents many difficulties. In the case of a VoiceXML (VXML) application, a VXML interpreter communicates with a platform that supplies the necessary speech technology needed to test the application in real-time. These speech technologies, such as an automatic speech recognition (ASR) engine, or a text-to-speech (TTS) engine or converter, are generally very CPU intensive and expensive to build and install. In addition to the speech technologies, to test a voice application a tester must also provided the input to the application. This usually requires a tester to physically perform the interaction, in the form of actual speech or key tone input, which may be cumbersome and difficult to provide. Having a person perform the input can be time consuming and costly.
It will be recognized by a skilled artisan that when testing a voice application, it can be difficult to mimic the true behavior of speech or audio input to the application, as well as any text-to-speech or pre-recorded audio output from the application. This is because voice applications are used in a run-time environment, and are therefore very “time-oriented.” A user is generally required to supply an input to the application within a certain amount of time or else a “speech timeout” may occur. Thus, the interaction between the user and the voice application depends upon the relative rates at which the inputs and outputs are made to and from the voice application.
It would be desirable therefore to provide a testing environment that allows the simulation of user interaction as well as the simulation of the speech technology platform, such that a developer of voice applications will no longer be dependent on human testers and speech technology and hardware to test their applications. The testing environment would therefore be a “simulation environment” that would adequately replace the user and speech technologies. It would further be desirable to provide a simulation environment that simulated the actual rates of execution of a user interaction with the voice application, as if real input and output were occurring. A system and method is therefore needed to simulate that real-time execution.